Friday, September 18, 2015

The Changing Space of the Landscape

“I categorize my paintings as
landscapes,
although hardly of the picturesque tradition.”Steven Baris

For the American abstract painter Steven Baris the changing space
between the suburbs and countryside has captured his fascination. Exurbia has
changed from a rural retreat for the wealthy to the distribution centers that
underpin the consumer society of the twenty and twenty first centuries.

As he explained toCulture Confidential’sMarjorie Lantaincus “Distribution centers… They are also referred to as “logistics
centers,” or my favorite, “fulfillment centers.” You probably drive by them all
the time; they are those low-lying, often incredibly wide, boxy buildings alongside
the highway ringed with scads of loading docks. You see those big 18-wheelers
buzzing in and out of them like bees servicing a hive.”

It was a phenomenon Baris became aware of as an art student traveling from
the rural countryside of his youth to Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art in the mid 1980’s.

As he old TiltedArc.com “I have always been sensitive to my spatial
surround. I grew up on various American Indian reservations out West (my father
worked for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs) where I lived in relatively
unpopulated environments from lush forests to the Great Plains. Moving to the
Northeast to attend graduate school, my spatial antennae afforded me a unique
perspective on radically different kinds of spaces. Over time I became
fascinated by the increasingly built-up regions that lay beyond the urban
centers and their contiguous suburbs (often referred to as exurbia). I have
witnessed the utter transformation of what was once primarily a world of small
towns and countryside into one of ever expanding networks of expressways,
corporate centers and big box distribution centers. My work is informed,
directly or indirectly, by these highly disorienting places. What I see are entirely
new kinds of landscapes–highly engineered and intensely geometricized.”

A landscape that lent itself to a hard edged geometric representation even
more visually austere than the usual urban landscape.

As he explains “Houses, office buildings and
stores all privilege one of their outer walls as a discernable façade meant to
face you as you approach. With most of the distribution centers that I’ve
observed it’s impossible to say which wall is supposed to be the front and
which is a side or the back. All that matters is where the loading docks are.”

An orientation that Baris explained further to SideArts.com “Unlike
older spaces that were based on orientation, be it sacred spaces, be it a world
where you knew that Jerusalem was over there, or Mecca or some skyscraper in a
major city, you always knew where you were planted. Whereas the world I’m
looking at is out and beyond all that, there is no orientation, it’s not about
orientation. That’s the whole point. So, is this an OK world? Or if not, I
don’t know. But there’s hard evidence to me by the fact of how disoriented I
am. But at the same time I’m drawn to it like moth to a flame. But, it’s the
modern world, look at the internet, there’s no place anymore, it’s a network
logic.”

Baris’ current exhibition The Smoothest of All
Possible Space is on show at
Philadelphia’s Pentimenti Gallery until the 17th
of October.

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The expat

Henry Bateman is an artist and writer currently living in Australia, a return home after living in the Philippines for 10 years. The Ex Expat, is his blog about the arts (often) and politics (sometimes).
His writing has been published by Crikey.com (Australia), Artslant (US), The Expat Travel & Lifestyle Magazine & The Expat Newspaper (both in the Philippines) and The Western Review (Australia).
He has also had seven solo exhibitions and has had his work shown in 15 group exhibitions as well as 35 theater commissions as a set designer and/or lighting designer.